Run-ons...forgive me for the random post!
I feel like I need to write something profound right now. I just finished my last IB test ever, and I won't think about them until next July when I get the results. It's a glorious day, and I'm sitting in a beam of sunlight that pierces my window, and I'm feeling a breeze on the skin of my arms, and the sun is so bright and at such an angle that I have my eyes closed as I type this, because it would hurt to keep them open. I love days like this.
I think that a problem with my writing is that I feel like it has to have purpose. Why do I worry about this? Purpose is created, to a certain extent, within the reader -- and if there are people willing to read what I have to write, then I should write it. Even if it's just something I want to write, I should write it.
But I'm torn between all of the many different things I could/should write right now. (I should do my math homework, but let's rule out that option for a moment and focus on the really important things.) For the first time in a long time, I feel like writing fanfiction. Also, I have to write a poem for humanities for tomorrow. Also, I need to plan out the characters that will belong to the script I'm going to write in June.
Part of me thinks I should probably just get the poem out of the way. This is a good, logical idea. But I'm not sure if I really want to do it...
I think I will, but just because I need to get back in the habit of poetry. And of freewriting in general.
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The summit reached, I look out
at the land that stretches before me, the land that I
can barely see -- instead the fog
becomes the focus, sprawled out below me, caressing
the bare rock sides of the mountain,
coating it in a blanket
of mist,
obscuring the trek. From this height,
my journey has taken me nowhere
and everywhere --
below I could not see this peak, the clouds
in the way, but here atop the mountain it is
the world below that loses
definition.
My world -- the one I've always
known -- lies trapped, suppressed
below the mist. What have I gained
by rising from beneath it?
The sky -- I gain the sky. The fullness of the world
rounds out from such a height, and though the world below
is the world I love, the world
of all those I remember, this is the world
where magic happens. This world owns my dreams,
the tongues of vapor curling round
my heart.
The things I need to live are left below me --
the food and water gone, my shelter lonely
without my warmth, my whole life
gone
in an instant from this sphere
and thrust above it
to a higher plane of being.
But not for long. Man can only stay
so long up here, above the clouds, communing
with God, or Earth, or Man (whatever you may call Him).
To stay too long begs Icarus's fate,
to burn for wanting more
of something endless, so while I may find peace
atop the world,
when I am done here
the descent awaits,
and down I'll trod with lightened heart
and homesick feet.
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I'll never truly understand him.
Sometimes, I get what I feel must be a moment of clarity, and I'm sure that I understand him intensely. I'm sure that I know him, in those moments, sure that I've plumbed the very depths of his being. The instances of such heightened empathy are few and far between, but all of those I have felt thus far have been cherished.
I can tell you all of them, starting all the way back with day one when I walked into his basement office (our basement office, my thoughts correct me by habit) and for a moment had a view of my partner I hadn't expected. I'd heard the stories about his odd methods and his eccentric obsessions, and I believed them. I had a picture fully formed in my head that day. I wasn't expecting it to be proven wrong.
And it wasn't really proven wrong -- that's not the right way to put it. It's more like, for that instant of our first meeting, my knowledge of him expanded. I could see that yes, he was different, and bound to be so, but unlike all of the impressions I'd received from his files and from word of mouth, during this first minute in his presence I felt like I somehow knew more about him than what I'd heard and read. I knew instantly that here was a man with purpose, a man driven by something I couldn't understand, and that this motivation had made him who he was. I saw him as one who was wary of attachments to others, but who would defend those he loved with his life. I saw a sensitive side beneath the self-deprecating humor, felt at the same time his twisted pride at his label as the "FBI's most unwanted." I swear I stood still for a moment on that threshold, shocked by the knowledge that I knew this man, though I had never seen him before, never spoken to him, only heard the stories.
And then it stopped -- after all, it was only a moment. I remember going home from that first day of work feeling foolish. Of course I hadn't had some meaningful connection with him. He was a distant person who would do anything to avoid another attachment in his life, and such a moment could certainly never happen between two people so diametrically opposed. I brushed it off. Never gonna happen again, I said, and I closed the door on that experience.
Except it did happen again. And again, and again. And every time I peeled back a new layer of my partner's personality. I learned new things about him through each of these moments of exposure -- and slowly, I realized that he must be learning about me, too.
At first, the thought frightened me. It seemed natural for me to want to know him if I was supposed to work with him on a daily basis, but for some reason, it didn't seem right that he would expect the same in return. Maybe it was my own solitary nature kicking in, but for a while I resented the fact that he became so knowledgeable about me and my life. I felt that such personal knowledge was the only power I had over him. In the beginning, I didn't understand the cases we worked on, didn't understand the way he thought, didn't understand all of the things about the supernatural and the occult and conspiracy theories and just plain weirdness. And to be honest, that scared me. I've grown up believing that knowledge is power, and that knowing the right things can get you out of any situation. So I grasped at what little knowledge I had, hoping it would keep me afloat, and it tormented me to no end to realize that I could never have the upper hand in this, no matter how long I tried.
That's how it used to affect me. Now, that seems like it belongs to some time far past. I can't really say when that phase ended, but somewhere in between him saving my life and me saving his, my whole concept of the "upper hand" stopped being important. Gradually, I realized that it's impossible to go through so many life-altering experiences with the same person and not learn about them in return. When I think back through the past six years, it's no surprise that we've become close -- in so many cases, he's the only person I can talk to about important events in my life because he's the only one who wants to believe what I've been through.
Either way, it all comes down to this: six years later, we are still here. We are still alive. We are still together -- always a pair, always a we. We are still learning about each other -- he still manages to do things I never could have expected. But a part of me is perfectly all right with this. When we first became partners, I scrutinized him with a clinical eye. I dissected him with my mind to figure out how he worked. I needed so desperately to understand him. Now I feel this may be impossible, but I'm all right with that.
I may never understand my partner, but I don't need to understand him in order to love him.